FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT ARIANNA HUFFINGTON - PAGE 3

My relationship with the Natural Resources Defense Council began the same time my marriage did, because my ex-husband was on the board. Well, my marriage ended, but my relationship with NRDC endures - mostly because my ex and I never asked NRDC who it really wanted to live with. Over the past 20 years, the work of the NRDC, which this past week held its annual Forces for Nature gala at the American Museum of Natural History, has only become more critical. That's because the fight now isn't just against pollution and the polluters.

By Arianna Huffington PARIS - Bonjour from Paris! This is an especially great moment to be in France. Across the political spectrum, people are asking the big questions - about the European Union, about class, about immigration, about race, about what the government's responsibility is to its people, about what the people's responsibility is to their country, about what it means to be French, about what it means to be European. Just last weekend there was the first-ever American-style primary for the French Socialist Party.

Why is running for president so often diminishing? By Arianna Huffington Tribune Media Services This weekend I saw something amazing -- a speech by Mitt Romney in which he was relaxed and natural, making jokes that weren't painfully awkward. After the speech, he took questions for 20 minutes, and answered them all thoughtfully and thoroughly. Who was this man, I wondered. Certainly not the same Mitt Romney I've seen in the last two years or so. Had I entered a different dimension?

Each year, the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity gathers thousands of innovative thinkers and practitioners in advertising and media from around the world to talk about what's new and what's next in our brave new digital world. Last year, I spoke about one of the most exciting developments online: the fact that the Internet has come out of its adolescent stage and is growing up into a place where our online and our offline lives have merged -- where the qualities we care most about offline are increasingly reflected in our experience online.

It's now a monthly ritual: Jobs numbers for the previous month come out, they're labeled "disappointing," and there's a lot of hemming and hawing and throat clearing and pronouncements about how "something really must be done," and about how vitally important it is to "get America back to work. " This time was no different: The latest numbers showed that the economy added only 80,000 jobs in October, while the unemployment rate took a barely perceptible dip from 9.1 percent to 9 percent.

As the seemingly endless GOP nomination fight grinds on, it's becoming clearer who President Obama's most formidable opponent is likely to be: himself. Sometimes a long, hard-fought primary is good for a party, forcing the candidates to become stronger, better and more responsive to the electorate. And sometimes a long, hard-fought primary is bad for a party. Like this year's GOP race. It's not surprising that on Intrade the chances of President Obama getting re-elected currently stand at around 60 percent, and that crack prognosticator Nate Silver has also listed President Obama "as about a 60 percent favorite" against Mitt Romney.

The latest job numbers may have come in below expectations, but the reaction sure didn't. Each month we all suspend disbelief and collectively participate in this little bit of kabuki theater, in which we pretend to not know things that we actually know. In this latest episode, the expectation going in to Friday's announcement was that 155,000 new jobs would have been created last month. When it turned out to be less than half that -- 69,000 -- there was mock shock and feigned horror all around.

A year ago, Michelle Obama and Jill Biden announced Joining Forces, a program to create and secure private-sector jobs for veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. At the time, the first lady said it was time to "build upon our nation's great patriotism by asking all Americans to take action and ensure our military families have the support they have earned. " A year later, the need for action remains. It's why, to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Joining Forces, HuffPost launched Military Families Week to honor our country's military families, put the spotlight on their sacrifices and help connect them with employment resources.

While listening to an NPR story about police using tear gas and rubber bullets to break up a demonstration, I was actually surprised when it turned out the newscaster was talking about Tahrir Square -- I had assumed it was about another brutal response to a peaceful protest here at home. All across the country, a war is being waged. This isn't a battle over parks and tents and sleeping bags. Though many of our leaders don't seem to realize it, this is a battle about their credibility, about how they represent us, about whom their real allegiance is to. Their misguided response to the Occupy protests has actually proved the point of the protesters more than any sign or chant could.

Back in the middle of August, just after Rick Perry tossed his cowboy hat into the ring, anonymous White House and Obama campaign aides were quoted as saying that they welcomed the Texas governor into the race because they assumed that, given his radical positions, he would be easier to beat. As Reuters' Eric Johnson put it at the time, "senior activists and influential Chicagoans close to the president say Perry's more polarizing views make him a bigger target for the Democrat in a general election.